Hmm, I did warn that I was going to be rushed.
> As a (hypothetical) system designer, your task is to allocate your
> spending dollars in the various categories so that they do the most
> good, in the sense that (theoretically) shifting a dollar from that
> aspect of the machine to any other would result in slower and less
> satisfactory performance. That's what a bottleneck _is_.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
More accurately, that's what the absence of a bottleneck is.
> The machine that actually _did_ fill that role (on the T-1) back around
> 1997 also simultaneously served as my main desktop box -- multiple
> xterms, AbiWord, Netscape Communicator, Gnumeric, Window Maker for the
> window manager. It was my now-antique K2/233 with 128MB of PC-100 [...]
^^^^^^
That's "K6/233", AMD's predecessor to the Athlon.[1] Pretty much the last
x86 CPU to run super-cool -- though Intel's Pentium M "mobile" series is
reported to be respectable.
It's a measure of just how much CPU power (usually) doesn't matter in
(at least conservative-type) typical Linux deployments that the 1997-era
K6 box is _still_ pretty zippy, either functioning as pretty much any
type or server or running lightweight X11 desktop environments such as
Window Maker. Of course, if I tried to animation-rendering work, or KDE
with all the chrome-effects enabled, it'd be toast.
[1] In all aspects other than floating-point performance, it was the
equal of the PPro and Pentium II CPUs of the same era -- and cost a
great deal less, _and_ ran a lot cooler.